This weekend the Wife and I had a booth at Singapore Mini Maker Faire. This is the second year we have been and the first time that we had a booth. The Wife exhibited some of her oil paintings as well as some sewing creations. I showed the BeerBot and Squirty. Given the breadth of […]
In my last post on stealth printing I described how I set up pronterface and VNC on a Raspberry Pi to control Squirty from an iPad. This lets me have the printer set up anywhere in the house rather than having it at my desk in the bedroom. Having it in the living room makes […]
In my last post I wrote about the problems I experienced trying to print the dial gauge holder. The belt kept slipping out of the x-carriage causing the print to fail. Each time it failed I dutifully took the carriage apart and put the belt back. I even put some tape on the bottom side […]
Many 3D printing forums and blogs lecture on the quintessential importance of a perfectly level print bed. Achieving this state of printing nirvana is however a tedious and difficult task. Checking the height of the bed at various points requires you to move the print head to that position and then carefully lower it until […]
3D printers make a lot of noise. The noise can have an almost musical character, especially when it is printing circular objects, however its musicality tends to wear off if you are be exposed to for long periods. Unfortunately 3D printers are also very slow. A big print can easily take 12 or even 24 hours. […]
One crushing criticism that has been aimed at home 3D printing is that it has no real practical use. People who take this point of view usually claim that far from being the vanguard of a new industrial revolution home printers are actually only really used for producing deformed yoda heads. In this post I […]
One of the most common questions that people ask you when you tell them that you have a 3D printer (shortly after they ask you can you print a gun) is how accurately can you print? My answer to this question has always been stolen from RepRapPro’s specifications page where it describes the accuracy of […]
Hairspray is so effective at sticking items to the printbed that sometimes it gets very difficult to pull them off once the print is done. If the shape is tall and gives you a bit of leverage then it’s usually easy enough to snap off, but if it is quite short and has a lot […]
In this post I’ll describe how to make a handy multi purpose printing accessory with some cheap Ikea furniture and a large wooden spoon.
I really like the gear designs designed by Emmett on Thingiverse. When printing the amazing Gear Bearing I had to adjust the tolerances and so got some idea of how OpenSCAD works.